Customer Reviews

A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women

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This anthology is very useful to anyone who wants to read contemporary poetry in traditional forms. I like the range of poets displayed ( from Rhina Esphillat to Nikki Giovanni to Honor Moore) and the way poets bend and extend the traditional forms we usually think of as confining. The authors also give a brief commentary on their work, which helps give the reader insight into how and why poets choose certain forms.

This volume, published in 1994, is one that no one teaching poetry workshops in the US wants to ignore, especially where women's poetry is concerned. Editor Annie Finch offers "formal" poetry from 60 women poets, a few, like Mona van Duyn, whose work dates back to the 1950s. Most, however, are contemporary American writers, such as Marilyn Hacker, Rachel Hadas, and Mary Jo Salter, several cited regularly when the topic of "new formalism" comes rhyming by. The appendices are particularly helpful, as they group poems by structure: English Sonnets, Terza Rima, Sestinas, etc. Each woman offers her insight into formal poetry, how she came to the writing, as well as how the form creates a sense of challenge or accomplishment for her. Not surprisingly, most also tell the reader how important the "early moderns" where to them, as novice writers. Hearty salutes to Moore, Bishop, and Bogan abound.

A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women

This is a gentle exploration of the work of women poets who write in a formal way or within a formal tradition. As well as featuring excellent poems by virtuoso formalists like Emily Dickinson, and contemporary poets in the new formalist movement like Marilyn Hacker, Annie Finch has done a great job in making available the work of these women poets. Now that so much modern free verse is merely telegraphese, what we find here is the basic notation of poetry, in its glory as sound and sense. Lovers of poetry can find here favourite sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eleanor Wylie, and find treasures of poems made available here for the first time in one volume